Monday, 21 January 2013

A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance at Tate Modern

Setting up a dialogue between Jackson Pollack and David
Hockney offers a promising introduction to an exhibition that looks at the
relationship between painting and performance over the past sixty years.
Pollack’s Summertime No.9A demonstrates all of the intuitive release that flows
out of his technique of placing the canvas on the floor thereby reasserting its
materiality and intrinsic character as an object made through the application
of paint to supporting surface. This is an art of impulse and wilfulness. He
does not analytically study a subject to copy or describe it but acts in the
moment fluidly moving through space to take the picture forward to a completion.
Much has been written and said about Pollock’s methods and goals but when you
see one of his mature paintings in the flesh their undeniable energy and
restlessness demand consideration and ultimately respect for their insistent details
of layered loops of paint. Within the exhibition the gallery takes the painting
off the wall and returns it the floor, its place of origin and reminds the
viewer of Pollock’s performative ritual. The image we see is part of a process
and not an end in itself. To comprehend the revolutionary impact of this
approach, we need to see it at our feet.

Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ elevates intellect and
deliberation. Taking two weeks to paint the splash of water following an
imaginary dive from an absent figure plunging deep into the water, Hockney
privileges the viewer with a photographic freeze-framed image of displaced
water. Looking at this complex spray of lifted white crested water, we know
this is a device that reinforces the artificiality of painting and its
translation of the observed world into fiction and effect. Water is never still
in this way but moves so fast that it becomes a memory rather than something
seen. Hockney’s emphasises both movement as stillness in this picture. The
Californian bungalow glows hot colours in the sunlight and the palm tree takes carries
Hockney’s desires as a Yorkshireman abroad searching for artistic and sexual
freedom during the early 1960s. A Bigger Splash is an act of homage to
Hollywood and a fantasy incorporating stereotypical motifs but he lends it an
uncanny air rather like a De Chirico painting that suggests human activity
through absence. So this is a work of synthesising different ideas and sources
together to make something that is the antithesis of Pollock’s spontaneous
dropping of paint.

These two paintings illustrate two critical themes in the
exhibition: performance and staging. Sometimes these tactics come together so
that they are not necessarily in opposition. The curators quote Allan Kaprow
the pioneer of performance who says that after Pollock artists had to
incorporate the performative, ‘real time’ element or give up painting entirely.
We are led through Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle and the Viennese Actionists
who in turn take the act of painting towards a theatrical and improvised
status. Where the exhibition begins to totter on the edge of relevance is the
inclusion of artists exploring identity through disguise and characterisation
such as Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman. Here make-up is literally taken as a
proxy for paint applied to the body but now the show feels quite removed from
either Pollock’s or Hockney’s concerns which we experienced in the first room.

The second half of the exhibition meanders even further from
the thematic frame with a focus on individual artists working on installations
that operate as sets or tableaux. Edward Krasinki’s application of blue lines of
tape at a consistent height around the walls and across suspended mirrors
raises interesting questions about control and autonomy at a time of political totalitarianism
but feel like a digression. Further on we encounter a very stylised
representation of Jean Cocteau’s world in an imaginary room by Marc Camille
Chaimowicz that fails to convey much interest beyond contrivance. This is a
theatrical set made inert by the absence of any performance.

Jutta Koether’s ‘The Inside Job’ connects one painting to
the response of visitors in New York to the picture hanging inside a rented
apartment but illustrates the problems of exhibiting a historic project outside
the parameters of its original environment and audience. This is a challenge
for exhibiting work related to performance beyond its original environment.
Joseph Beuys managed to invest his objects and vitrines arising out of his
performances with an enduring vitality. In the final room of this exhibition
Lucy McKenzie’s beautiful hanging screens that masquerade as flat painted sets
evoke that uncanny displacement and uncertainty we first found in Hockney’s
Californian hedonism. Now McKenzie has given her illusions a life-sized
architectural presence, which are
subsequently taken further into fiction as sets for an accompanying fictional
film.

So what we discover inside this rambling exhibition a few
moments when painting’s relationship to performance is explicit and appropriate
but often the argument begins to ramble. Pollock and Hockney though remind us of
painting’s power to reconnect us to urgent expression on the one hand and intricate
invention on the other.

About Me

I am a London-based lecturer and writer specialising in Modern and Contemporary art. I teach at Christie's Education, Sotheby's Institute and work freelance at the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. I am also a reviewer for Flash Art magazine.This blog is a place to comment on art and visual culture in London and abroad. I Tweet @Joshuaswhite and Five Senses can be found at http://joshuasimonwhite.blogspot.co.uk

For any publishing projects or media appearances, I can be reached at joshua@joshuaswhite.com. Formerly, I was a founding editor of Metrobeat (now Citysearch), New York, the first listings guide to the city and subsequently the launch producer of the BBC Online homepage.